One of the great things about phpBB is that it’s highly customizable and extendable both in terms of functionality and looks. This means that:
You can use your preferred color scheme, fonts, and overall layout.
You can modify phpBB and develop your own feature extensions, or you can use existing modifications.
In this section, you will find a few real-life examples of how phpBB is used to power online community sites.
Let’s start with an example of an out-of-the-box solution that uses the default phpBB style and the default set of features. On this example site, even the phpBB logo is left intact. This is the site of Distributed Proofreaders (http://www.pgdp.net/phpBB2/), a site that uses phpBB to provide a web-based method of easing the proofreading work associated with the digitization of public-domain books into Project Gutenberg e-books. By breaking the work into individual pages, many proofreaders can be working on the same book at the same time.
The next examples are phpBB installations with the default feature set, but with different styles. You have a lot of options when it comes to the presentation of your board.
Instead of going with the default phpBB looks, you can find a pre-made template that better suits your needs and layout/color preferences. Or, if you can’t find a template you’d like to use and you know some HTML, you can even create your own custom templates. Here are some sites that use templates different than the default one.
Mike Lothar: The personal site (http://community.mikelothar.com/) of one of the authors of the Packt book Building Online Communities with phpBB 2 (ISBN: 1-904811-13-2). His chapter in that book guides you through the process of creating your own custom templates:
Keenspot: A bulletin board for discussing comic books (http://forums.keenspot.com/):
ForumPlasma: A gaming community (http://www.forumplasma.com/):
Some sites opt in for the default phpBB style, but introduce new features. These new features are often called modifications (MODs) or hacks.
You can find lots of pre-made MODs available for free download, and you can use them to enhance your board.
Dogomania forums: A community of dog owners. The site differs from the standard phpBB installation with its custom header, footer, and navigation (http://forum.dogomania.com/):
GaiaOnline is the ultimate phpBB bulletin board. The template for this site is custom, and quite a few features, customizations, and optimizations are introduced. With about 200 million posts and 1.5 million registered users, this is the biggest bulletin board on the Internet (http://www.gaiaonline.com):
